Farewell to Mike & Mike

By Jason Mast

I found Mike & Mike when I found running, and I discovered that I simply didn’t know or like enough music to last an hour or more a day, six days a week. It was high school, and the longtime radio program had just started releasing their show as podcast. When the miles grew too long and my mind wavered and my shoulders sagged, I plugged in those two breezy voices to the finish. I ran a marathon that way senior year, listening to Golic and Greenberg talk about baseball rumors I can’t remember and basketball news I couldn’t fathom caring about for at least 13 of the 26.2 miles.

Mike & Mike had its detractors. It was never the most edgy show, or the most incisive – probably not even the most insightful or entertaining. For this reason, its support was always strongest in middle-America, away from the cluttered and vitriolic media markets along the coasts and in Chicago. They were two guys talking sports, calmly, plainly, with no curses and plenty of empathy. A show parents could turn on with their kids. A show a kid could throw on whenever.

And maybe that’s why Mike & Mike became more than just a show but a national pulse, a constant and steady voice through nearly two decades of turmoils: 9/11, war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, Katrina, devastating recession, the stagnant recovery, shootings, shootings, shootings, Sandy. Through it all, the Mikes broadcast a simple reminder: There is a world beyond this, at once frivolous and crucial, that beats on. “We hope we can provide a distraction,” Greenberg often said on the mornings he had to double as the 6 a.m. deliverer of tragic news.

Over time, for reasons that seem to me less clear, it became a pulse for me. When I was a freshman here, anxious, alone, and afraid to hear myself think, I turned to their voices. I listened to entire shows walking across campus.

At 10 a.m. EST on Nov. 17, those two voices signed off for the last time together. For college students, at least those like myself, it wasn’t just a standalone goodbye, but one of a gradual sloughing off of the old voices, those pulses that gave the rhythm of the America we grew up in: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Stuart Scott.

Those pulses have faded. America, as it does, is finding new currents. Our parents had Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite, and their parents had Walter Winchell and Edward Murrow. Who knows what now voice will find rhythm next – and what America it will articulate.